Learning the Kalman Filter

Michael Kleder’s “Learning the Kalman Filter” mini tutorial, along with the great feedback it has garnered (73 comments and 67 ratings, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars),  is one of the most popular downloads from Matlab Central and for good reason.

In his in-file example, Michael steps through a Kalman filter example in which a voltmeter is used to measure the output of a 12-volt automobile battery. The model simulates both randomness in the output of the battery, and error in the voltmeter readings. Then, even without defining an initial state for the true battery voltage, Michael demonstrates that with only 5 lines of code, the Kalman filter can be implemented to predict the true output based on (not-necessarily-accurate) uniformly spaced, measurements:

 

This is a simple but powerful example that shows the utility and potential of Kalman filters. It’s sure to help those who are trepid about delving into the world of Kalman filtering.